Well having grown up in the swamps before everybody got rich and all insured and such, I can tell you a thing or two about flooding. We always looked at floods as pretty much natural and a gift from Mother Nature. You get a good hurricane come ashore and you can pretty much figure on living wet for a few days or a week, that's what we call it when the floor is underwater. I can recall a couple times when we jacked the beds up on mater juice cans filled with small stones and pinned the blanket up to the edge of the mattress so it didn't dip in the water and get wet while you slept.
Worst part was snakes & skeeters, of course they are always a part of life in the swamp but they get a lot thicker when the water comes up. Mom always had a few cashes stashed in barrels on high ground, man if we woulda had plastic barrels back then we woulda thought we died and went to heaven. Whole trick to flooding is making the best of it, and getting to work right quick as the water goes down. We always kept some Fels Naptha soap up in the rafters so it'd be handy when the water started down. Generally the floor would have a few gaps between boards, and you take a board up about the middle of the floor so you can dip a broom, and get to wetsweeping the mud off the walls and such as the water drops. Then you broom the mud off th efloor and get to washing everything down withthe Fels. I think I may still have a callous or two on my knees from scrubbing away at the floor. If you were lucky and knew somebody who worked for one of the oil companies like Gulf, they might come by with one of them little gasoline pumps on a boat, and you could take that hose and do a real easy cleanup with it.
Later on when I went to work for the Gulf Oil as a trucker and lived with my sister and husband in town it seemed like people had no dang idea how to clean up after. Of course most city houses sit right down on the ground not up on posts, so when the water comes it pretty much gets everything. There was one came through in the 50s I remember well. Sister and I got out the cans and husband just stood there looking like he was lightning struck. He was a city boy. Well we jacked up the furniture and then we grabbed the boards up and put together this sort of second floor just about 4 feet up from the floor and stuck everything up there. The neighbors all stood looking dumb and watching. They pretty much dragged their wet stuff to the curb and we brought outs back down when the place dried out. That was a bad one where sister lived, she had that little Kaiser automobile I bought her, and by time it was obvious the neighborhood was going under that car didn't have a chance. No way we was letting a year old car flood out, so we got a couple planks and 4 barrels and made that car into a raft. We took a tree branch and tied it to the front bumper of the Kaiser and tied the back to my Diamond T pickup and drove right to high ground with people looking at us swampers like we lost out minds. Shoot, we saved ur stuff and hauled the neighbor kids to high ground while the rest stood around and looked. That Diamond T was pulling a Kaiser and 3 rowboats and never missed a beat going through 3 foot deep water. Dang good thing nobody thought of strapping a couple boards to their feet or I might have been pulling a waterskier too. Of curse the brakes weren't worth much after till I got em washed out good and dried, but we was on high ground.
Now the thing I never could understand is why people who don't have to build on low ground next to a river and expect it not to flood out in a wet year. Then the government comes along and builds high concrete walls just back fromthe river, and everybody stands around a few years later watching the river come over that wall. What do you expect, that river carrys a lot of dirt from upstream, and that dirt stays between them walls. You fill the riverbottom with dirt the water level's going to get higher. Good Lord you can't fill a bathtub with dirt and expect to put 5 cans of water in it like you could before the dirt was in there.
Sure seems like the more people go to them colleges the more good sense they either forget or don't learn. Then again people seem to be too good to work and keep themselves out of trouble these days. I sure don't know where they get all the money to buy stuff and then try selling it to the insurance company, and I can't figure how they think that idea's going to last long. Talekd to a fellow here a while back who was looking to buy a house and was all set to go till they told him he had to buy flood insurance too. The house sits on a hill, and water would need to come up 15 feet to get tohis yard, but some brilliant fellow went and drew a map so he was supposed to pay $2500 a year for flood insurance on top of paying for the house. He said he spent a day trying to talk sense to people at the bank before he just gave up and went looking for another house.
